We in the First World are individually consuming carbon at an average rate requiring three planet Earths to sustain. Some people would need ten. Don Hewett argues that we need a collective ‘tipping point’ in attitude.

As I suntan on my balcony in Melbourne three weeks from winter’s official start, I wonder why community action on climate change has taken so long to crystallise? Is it the boiling frog syndrome, or a bizarre version of the bear in the woods analogy: you don’t have to outrun the bear, only the other guy.

In other words, is it ignorance or selfishness? Or is it both? Do we really know what we are doing to our one and only environment? Do we care – enough? Or are there other factors at work?

For the first time in human history the evidence of a significant threat to our security has been starkly available to everybody simultaneously, highlighted (or low-lighted perhaps) by extreme events like the Victorian bushfires¹ (our Katrina) and the Queensland floods, and yet we do not have the collective response that other threats to our security engender, for example war or terrorism.

Why not? We can’t stop this runaway train in its tracks obviously – that would be a cure worse than the disease. For better or worse, we are indissolubly bonded to our carbon partner. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t target what you might call ‘discretionary’ carbon consumption, the energy we don’t have to use if we are more thoughtful, informed and conscientious in the way we live. And here we encounter the clash between personal freedom and collective priorities, what you might call an attitude problem.

This was sharply defined for the author in 2007 on an unseasonably warm and sunny Mother’s Day, in what proved the warmest May – indeed the warmest Autumn – along the whole Eastern seaboard for 150 years. Globally, 2007 tied with 1998 as the second hottest year on record, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
2005 is the hottest year on record. The eight warmest years in the GISS record have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years in the record have all occurred since 1990.

An aside: climate change sceptics have made much of the 0.7° drop in 2007 the noticeably cooler start to 2008, and the very cold Northern Hemisphere winter of 2009 – even warning of another ‘little ice age’. But according to non-sceptics, this cooling is due in large part to the strongest La Nińa event in 20 years, which began early in 2007. This cooling will be extended by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [PDO], now entering its ‘cool phase’, or gone ‘negative’. The dip in temperature has sparked renewed debate about other potential climate change factors, like decreased sunspot activity caused by the late start of Sunspot Cycle 24, not to mention the Earth’s angle of inclination, the precession of the equinoxes, and the planet’s orbital elliptic, these latter three long term effects held to be the ‘real’ climate agents. (Click for more info)

But atmospheric CO2 levels are still increasing, up 0.6% in 2007 according to measurements by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and warming is expected to resume as the La Nińa effect wanes. The National Center for Atmospheric Research in Bolder, Colorado, disputes the sunspot theory, saying its effects would be negligible.

And if you can suntan in Melbourne in mid-May, something’s afoot, and it would not appear to be another ice age, even a little one.

But back to Mother’s Day 2007. We were at lunch in a Yarra Valley restaurant. One of our group, an incessant world traveller, was showing a picture of her grandson. As someone immersed in developing a community engagement strategy on climate change (change so conspicuously on display that day), I couldn’t resist asking the obvious question: do you think about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melting when you think of your grandson?

”Of course,” she retorted. I pressed on: the Antarctic is melting… “I know,” she said, “I’ve just come back. I’ve seen it melting.”

There was no hint of irony, guilt or offset strategy. I pointed out that if everybody exercised their ‘right’ to go to the Antarctic, it would melt all the faster, that the West Antarctic Sheet contained enough fresh water to raise sea levels by an average six metres, and she would be getting a boat from her harbour roof.

“It won’t happen in my lifetime,” she said. What about your daughter and your grandson? I asked. “It won’t happen in theirs either”, she said, with somewhat less conviction. I pointed out it certainly could. And what if it does? I asked. “They’ll cope,” she said.

It was the conversation closer. I was left to ponder the obvious. How could this otherwise well-informed woman not make (or perhaps not want to make) the connection between exercising her ‘right’, and everybody else who could afford it exercising their ‘right’, to jet round the globe seeing the rapidly vanishing sights (go before they’re gone!), or cruise to the glorious, monumentally important Antarctic their actions were helping to melt? (Within a couple of weeks, the Sunday Herald-Sun magazine featured ‘10 wonders of the vanishing world’ and – again with no hint of irony – recommended visiting ‘asap’.)

Why was she so unconcerned about her high carbon consumption lifestyle when it promised so little for her descendants? She is not alone. Post-war generations are still mental prisoners of our conditioning, the legacy of rising prosperity, and the mindset that after a lifetime of work we deserve a reward. It was imprinted: go to school, get a job, retire, travel. The pinnacle of life was a world trip. Now the Sunday drive may once again become a luxury.

Like St Augustine’s plea to God for celibacy ‘but not now’, we are a society increasingly concerned about the ‘future’, which is conveniently ‘not now’. No more conspicuous example thrusts itself at us (in the wealthier suburbs) than children being ferried to school in 4WD’s to keep them safe.

Apart from what it says about the relative value of less well-defended progeny in smaller, lighter (environmentally friendlier) cars, it also indicates a serious disconnect between the ‘safety’ of children and the impact of high carbon lifestyles. Put another way, are parents merely keeping their children ‘safe’ so they can live to see an environmental catastrophe that could make them wish they’d never been born?

As well as our unenlightened self-interest (six degrees separate from sheer selfishness, but a dangerous signal to the developing world), it seems there is a fourth factor at work: overload. We tend to just switch off when it becomes too hard to keep track mentally of the implications of our actions, or in the words of Al Gore, when it comes to recognising an inconvenient truth.

Our mindset has to change. The Antarctic melting, with its potential for shutting down the ocean circulating pump, stopping vital currents like the Gulf Stream, and eutrophying seas as well as raising sea levels, is only the most dramatic example of the threat posed by global warming.

The IPCC’s fourth report (November 17, 2007), the synthesis of thousands of hours of research and analysis by thousands of scientists over four years, echoes the NASA Goddard Institute’s report Earth In Peril released in 2008, and the Stern report before that. The conclusion of them all: we have 5-10 years to take action before reaching a potential ‘tipping point’ in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and in turn the appalling prospect of ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect, or as the IPCC puts it, “abrupt and irreversible” global warming.

Professor Ross Garnaut’s report later that year and reports since have urged more action – deeper cuts – sooner, underlining the speed at which even alarming new estimates are being overtaken by events. In fact, a feature of successive reports is the conclusion that we are experiencing the extreme end of climate change predictions, rather than the low end or median of predictions.

The only substantial difference between the reports is what constitutes a ‘dangerous’ level of C02. Whereas the IPCC puts it in a range somewhere between 445ppm and 710ppm (an upper limit that brings gasps of disbelief from climate change campaigners), the Goddard Institute puts the ‘dangerous’ level at 450ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, though this has even more recently been revised downwards to 350ppm (we are currently at 385ppm and atmospheric CO2 is rising by about 2-3ppm per year).

The Big Fixes like carbon sequestration are still more concept than reality² and won’t cut in for 15 or 20 years at best. Worse, they will actually generate more emissions until then. Even the comforting tree planting – except in the tropics where rain still falls and growth is fast and relatively assured – is a 20-year exercise before significant CO2 is absorbed, that is if you can actually water the trees, and assuming fire or drought doesn’t turn a carbon ‘sink’ into a vast plume of smoke or a barren wasteland. (It is of course a terrible irony that Mallee eucalypts are the best sequesters of carbon and are now being replanted, while tropical forests are being cleared rather than planted.)

As the prospect of a resources crisis and a Jurassic-style greenhouse³ looms larger, we can’t go on pretending that the time hasn’t come yet to review the way we live. Just because we have promised ourselves a spot of globetrotting (or a Hummer, or long hot showers, or a McMansion, or sub-orbital flight), doesn’t mean we are ‘entitled’ to squander the planet’s capital.

We have to learn to voluntarily restrain our carbon consumption, lighten our carbon load, reduce our ecological footprint – in as many ways as possible. If we don’t, future generations could find themselves with an effective ‘carbon quota’, a ration either imposed by regulation or rising costs of resources, or both. This would be incompatible with, indeed likely make a mockery of, Western lifestyles as we know them.

To put it in a more familiar financial perspective: if you wanted to leave your children an inheritance, as most people do, it wouldn’t make sense to spend so much that it plunged them into debt, even bankruptcy, before they started.

Which brings us to a final analogy, that of Easter Island, and the fate of a society so dysfunctional that it couldn’t stop felling trees⁴, even the last – thus sealing the fate of the inhabitants. Substitute the planet for Easter Island, and the last tree for that ‘tipping point’ in atmospheric carbon our burning of fossil fuels is propelling us towards, and you get the picture.

So why are we slow to change, even resisting it in some cases, when the consequences of business-as-usual are so dire? Denial, more recently camouflaged as ‘healthy scepticism’, has definitely dragged the chain, perhaps critically. Neither is there a world government to impose standards and enforce compliance; the UN requires volunteers and is more often a platform for conflict than consensus.

Already there is a philosophical gulf separating Developed and Developing nations, exacerbated by the insistence (at least until recently) of the more intractable Western nations that Developing nations sign up at the same time to limiting emissions – which to them effectively means limiting economic growth and the ability of their (expanding) populations to live Western lifestyles.

Though we shudder at the thought of every Chinese and Indian household having air conditioning, plasma TVs, refrigerators (‘all mod cons’), they of course ask ‘why not?’. We in the West answer that the atmosphere will not be able to cope, and everybody will suffer. If we increase their belligerence, they will answer ‘so what!’.

The fact that no new world order on climate change can be accomplished without the big emitters in the Developing world begs the question: why have we continued to live high on the carbon hog for at least a decade after it became obvious our lifestyles (for the first time in human history) were changing the (global) climate.

Surely it is both utterly cynical and obscenely hypocritical for us to demand of the latecomers that they pay our bill for living it up on Hotel Earth for decades, and a decade (or two) after we knew we couldn’t go on racking up the bill at that rate. To put it in perspective, while China might well be the largest emitter now, historically it has been responsible for about 7% of emissions as against 30% for the US, and 80% from the First World. From an equity point of view, Developing nations have the West over a barrel.

Pragmatism insists they must be part of the solution: the question is how? What about us leading by example rather than churlishly insisting that they lead in lockstep with the West? Remember, most of their citizens, numerous as they are, still live individually at a fraction (20% or less) of the carbon consumption pace of the average Westerner, and particularly the standouts, North Americans and Australians, who are respectively second and first per capita on the carbon consumption honour roll (excluding Dubai and other Arab states).

One would have to be brain dead or implacably obstinate not to see the justice, equity and sheer necessity for the West to lead on reversing the trend that it largely created, and still – per capita and by example – largely drives through rampant consumerism, ironically now turbocharged by children’s consumerism, and based on low-cost manufacturing in Developing nations. It is a hellishly twisted feedback loop.

Lacking an existing worldwide institution capable of coordinating climate change responses, what can concerned citizens of the planet do? What can break the deadlock over climate change action on a global scale? Or put another way, what would we do if our lives depended on it?

In this context, climate change is not the only phenomenon peculiar to our age; global awareness and connectedness is another. 150 years ago, the Chinese got news of and had joined the Californian gold rush before Americans on the East Coast. Today, news from almost anywhere can be global in seconds.

The world now is literally porous to ideas. This is a profound change somewhat masked by the dazzling technology that has enabled it. But the realisation that has dawned with the individual-empowering Internet is bigger than the technology: we have witnessed the dawn of global shared consciousness in real time. It is the realisation that we can all know something at once; overlaid on this is a universal experience and subject, the weather.

We can no longer plead ignorance in a wired world. We know what’s happening and we know that we all know what’s happening. We have an obligation to exploit our newfound, shared consciousness in real time about climate change, to make our individual and collective voice heard, and to speak even more loudly through our actions – sharing the load.

It is time for action by everybody urgently. Everybody knows it: the question is how? There are a raft of remedies relying on the ‘technology will save the day’ theory when actually all these projects would be generating emissions for at least the 10 years set as the outer limit for significant cuts by Stern, the Goddard Institute, the IPCC and Garnaut. We need to nosedive, now.

This is going to require a community engagement campaign on the scale of a mobilisation for war, based on a commonly shared concern and desire to act, and some important principles (see Box). The most fundamental, and the impetus behind our Global Green Plan (GGP), is that we need to be, and to be seen to be, acting together – collectively and in concert. There is strength in numbers. There is reinforcement in a common resolution.

But to achieve that, we need to accept a shared responsibility for climate change and for the action now required to mitigate its effects. We need a ‘tipping point in attitude’, for our sakes as well as for future generations.

We need to change the way we think so we can change the way we act, go from consumers to conservers. Changing behaviour is not about finger pointing, despite the previous Antarctic example; we are all part of the problem and we all have to be part of the solution. Nor is it enough any more to (forgive the pun) merely ignite public concerns; it is about providing solutions.

Community engagement has proved an elusive quarry, and, on the scale required, is as difficult to achieve – outside wartime – as it is easy to say.

The GGP strategy is to launch the process through schools and youth, and to progressively gather up households, business and government, the whole community, in a Carbon Challenge, a challenge we believe is not so much a national emergency as a battle for the planet.
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Footnotes:

1. For those unfamiliar with the worst fires in Australia’s history, February 7, 2009 (Black Saturday), on which over 170 people were killed, was the hottest day on record in Melbourne at 46.8 C, and in Victoria a record 48 C plus was recorded in Hopetoun in the State’s north. It followed a record hot spell of three days in succession in late January 28-30 of over 40 C (43.4 C, then 44.3 C and finally 45.1 C). Black Saturday was accompanied by winds up to and exceeding 100 kph.
2. A recent estimate suggests that to sequester 10% of emissions from coal-fired power plants would require an infrastructure as big as that in use by the whole world oil industry today.
3. Ironically, it was the eutrophycation of the seas, causing massive algal blooms, in the Jurassic that we owe our climate change crisis today; the algae settled on the sea floor and was compressed eventually into coal.
4. Recent speculation suggests it is down to religious rivalry – the trees were used to raise the iconic Easter Island statues upright – as groups vied to erect the biggest statues in an obviously vain attempt to assert their, and its, authority, and presumably curry favour with the Gods.

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